Large and small-scale computing systems require changes to be made almost on a daily basis. These changes can be of various types, such as replacing, adding or upgrading software components, and reconfiguration.
The implementation of these changes is performed by generating a service request handled by a change management system. A service request captures the description of the change and its history. The change itself goes through various steps, such as change creation, information gathering, approval, and actioning. Different people or processes typically work on a change at different stages in the process flow. The process flow often is a combination of automated and manual change implementation.
A common problem faced is that a change request has insufficient or missing data. In such situations, the person performing a process step may have to spend a lot of time collecting the required information, which may be spread over many different sources. Sometimes this knowledge resides only in the minds of people working on the computing system in question and is not otherwise captured or recorded anywhere.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide for an automated approach to populating service requests that contain missing data, and to recover at least some of any missing data.